lyceum

lyceum:0.1.0 is a Typst template for a simple, single-volume academic book.

The template offers the following named functions to be used as show rules in the user documents: FRONT-MATTER, BODY-MATTER, APPENDIX, and BACK-MATTER.

After more than 400 commits, several strategies were implemented in order to cause Typst to properly format the various book sections (of FRONT and BODY matters, as well as the APPENDIX, and the BACK-MATTER), with little success, and the currently released format is the one deemed as the least-worse one of them.

The way Typst was though and implemented caused many strategies to fail, including (here, the list is likely to be non-exhaustive):

• Template functions to define how things should be typeset: this goes against the Typst way of doing templating, and it fails because Typst code placed inside a function cannot alter the caller’s environment;
• Writing metadata to the document so that itens can dynamically (through #context query(...)) determine how things should be typeset. Headings were able to work just fine according to this strattegy, however, variable page numbering schemes failed to work, since on #set page(...), the numbering field must be a hard string literal – not a variable that resolves to a string, as the documentation suggests, but a constant, hard, string literal. What could be an elegant approach, at the end of the day, was hindered;
• OK, let’s do the officially supported template function to use in the user’s show rule! Which was found (to the extent of my research and documentation digging) to be utterly unable to produce custom formats for different document sections, which causes me to wonder why article templates are plentiful in Typst Universe, but book templates are scarce.
• Finally, it dawned on me to have multiple show rules in the user document, each one using a different template function, i.e., the FRONT-MATTER(...), BODY-MATTER(...), APPENDIX(...), and BACK-MATTER(...) ones. A quick test on a standalone document (with no template) showed that the approach works like a charm, in having section-specific formattings being correctly applied, and settings correctly propagating to the #outline, etc… however, when the strattegy is implemented in a template form, some changes take a while to be effective, even though, their corresponding settings commands are issued at the right place in the document. I’ve spent some rounds trying to make it work, but I ran in situations in which by fixing one issue, another previously inexistent just appeared. After several rounds of fixing, locally releasing, and testing, the configuration deemed as having the least amount of bugs is being released, as this 0.1.0.

Name

lyceum designates “a place where educational talks were given to the public”, according to the Cambridge Dictionary. Thus, being a non-specific place (or instrument) for educational contents exchange, it seemed fitting for a non-canonical name for a typst @preview academic book package name, since academic books are primarily meant for educational content exchange.

Prominent Features

Metadata Handling

In lyceum, book metadata was inspired by the Hyagriva bibliography manager. Book metadata, such as title, author(s), publisher, keywords, date, and etc…, must be fed to the first user’s #show rule function, FRONT-MATTER(...), which processes it and saves it to the document with #metadata.

Beyond that, metadata processing done by lyceum includes the automatic generation of the book’s own Hayagriva entry. This functionality works in two ways, i.e., (i) the book’s own Haygriva bibliography entry can be either typeset and included in the very document, or (ii) an yml file type can be conveniently generated using the make utility, as in make main.yml if the book is written on the main.typ file. The template stencil implements these two ways of obtaining the book’s bibliography entry.

Citing

This package can be cited with the following bibliography database entry:

lyceum-template:
  type: Web
  author: "Naaktgeboren, C."
  title: "Lyceum: Academic Book Template in Typst"
  url: https://github.com/cnaak/lyceum.typ
  version: 0.1.0
  date: 2024-10